


kiss me while i calculate and calibrate

by hammerhorror



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Blow Jobs, Eddie is erotically unhinged, Finger Sucking, First Time, Fix-It, Getting Together, Hand Jobs, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:36:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28781355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hammerhorror/pseuds/hammerhorror
Summary: A lot of things are supposed to come before the part where someone calls you up and tells you they put their address down for billing purposes when you were dying in the hospital.Or, actually, maybe that’s not a normal part of the progression of a relationship at all.Eddie wouldn’t know, obviously.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 32
Kudos: 433





	kiss me while i calculate and calibrate

**Author's Note:**

> hi. i don’t know how to trigger/content warn this. there’s a lot of rumination on unwellness and some unpleasant imagery involved in eddie’s thought process, but the intention isn’t really to be, like, negative, he’s just processing the intensity of his feelings for richie after years of misery and trauma. this is ultimately supposed to be about self-actualization and acceptance of love. thanks for reading ily 
> 
> title from Jonathan by Fiona Apple

A lot of things are supposed to come before the part where someone calls you up and tells you they put their address down for billing purposes when you were dying in the hospital.

Or, actually, maybe that’s not a normal part of the progression of a relationship at all.

Eddie wouldn’t know, obviously.

“I just didn’t know your address, so,” Richie says. 

“Okay,” Eddie says. “That’s fine. We can fix that.”

“I figured you’d be, like, super pissed if I decided to play the martyr and pay them off for you,” Richie says, and he’s very right about that. “But I went through and called the companies to ask for an itemized list of expenses to get some of the totals knocked down a little. Which I guess was kind of stupid in hindsight, since I didn’t even update your address, but—well, you know. I’ve never been the best at thinking things through.” 

And that’s when Eddie starts thinking maybe he really is in love. 

Once the doctors were certain Eddie was out of the woods, Richie sat at his bedside and told Eddie that he loved him. Eddie, drugged up and reevaluating the state of his entire life, at first assumed Richie meant that that he loved him in that deep, loyal, childlike way they had all loved each other as kids. He told Richie he loved him, too.

In saying it, he felt so raw and vulnerable and scared and it hit him then what kind of love Richie was talking about.

The weird thing, though, was that Eddie was okay with it.

And the reason why Eddie was okay with it was because that same kind of love had also been living imprisoned in the darkest corner of his heart for the last twenty-three years. Funny how that worked out.

Through the hazy fog of amnesia and nearly dying, Eddie could see a phantom silhouette taking form in front of him. Elusive like a white rabbit, like a hummingbird, Eddie had spent over two decades mourning an emptiness sat necrotic in his soul in a shape he couldn’t identify.

He could identify it now.

If Richie had given Eddie the chance, Eddie would have said, “I think I always loved you.”

But Richie was impatient as always, hurried and frustrated and so committed to being eternally misunderstood. Richie said, “No, you don’t. You don’t understand, Eds,” which made Eddie very angry.

If Eddie’d had a minute to fully process what all had happened over the last week and maybe compartmentalize a few things here and there, they may have gotten through the conversation without it turning into a petty argument that ended with a nurse coming in and demanding Richie leave Eddie’s hospital room. Sadly, that was how it went, and Richie was on a flight to California soon after.

“Arguing over who loves who more sounds pretty par for the course for you two,” Stan said a few hours later. He was wearing those ugly gripped hospital socks and picking at Eddie’s neglected tray of bland, unsavory hospital food. Eddie’s nurses were beginning to scold him for not finishing his meals, so Stan was doing him a favor by eating some turkey and lukewarm mashed potatoes. 

Stan’s wrists were bandaged. He had dark circles under his eyes. And yet in the summer light shone through the window, illuminating the darkened room in loose strands as the curtains moved from the force of the A/C unit underneath, Stan somehow looked all of thirteen years old. 

“I don’t know if I love him,” Eddie said stupidly. “I mean, I love him. I _love_ Richie. Am I in love with Richie, today? I don’t know.”

“That’s a weird thing to say after yelling at him for refusing to believe you could possibly be in love with him,” Stan said, then he bit down hard on a carrot stick. And that was a fair assessment, Eddie figured. 

Stan was going to leave soon, too, just like Richie left. Everyone was going to leave Eddie eventually and he was going to be painfully and miserably lonely, just like before.

Right? That was definitely what was happening here. He couldn’t fathom anything else, because it was all he had ever known for twenty-three years. He was going to be alone. He had a pathetic, emotionally decrepit life waiting for him in New York City and he was going to be completely alone.

And yet his hospital room was filled with flowers from the people who love him the most, because they were thinking of him and worrying for him and always, always loving him. They sent the flowers to remind him that he’s never alone.

“He left without saying goodbye,” Eddie said, because it was going to take him a long time to stop being angry about that.

“Well, let’s see,” Stan said thoughtfully, “he’s an offensively wealthy celebrity with zero impulse control. Seems appropriately dramatic to me.”

The arrival of Eddie’s medical bills coincides with the tail-end of his heinously expensive and emotionally draining divorce, because when it rains it fucking pours.

He’s been staying with Beverly, occasionally going upstate to stay with Ben when Beverly becomes overwhelmed by her own midlife clusterfuck. The lack of independence makes him feel like a child, but the orthopedic doctor who treated his arm told him, somewhat unkindly, that he needed to grow up and learn how to accept help from others or his recovery would be significantly worse than it needed to be. He took that to heart. 

The good thing is that he kept his job and is working modified hours mostly from home and he’s still okay on money, despite the fact that Myra would have happily bled him completely dry if given the chance. Eddie thanked his pre-Derry self for walking the proverbial line as a human and spouse, because Myra had insufficient evidence to prove most of her claims that he was erratic and unstable and unfaithful. Her venomous accusation of Eddie being a _maliciously dishonest homosexual_ seemed to be more out of petty bitterness than actual justified suspicion. Eddie had at least managed to keep that one part of himself a secret from her.

The car crash and abrupt flight to Maine had been cause for concern, but Eddie still ended up okay when all was said and done. Myra would be fine, too, and they would both be better off without each other.

He’s adjusting to his new life and he’s in good company with Beverly and Ben, despite their own issues. They seem to benefit from his company as well, so it’s nice to feel like he has something to give for once in his life. All he’s ever done is take, it seems, even when he didn’t want to.

The bad thing is he hates his job and now he hates seeing seven different invoices that remind of him of the time his lung collapsed and the nerve damage in his left arm and how Richie’s face looks all stupid and scrunched up when he cries.

To recap:

  1. Eddie saw Richie for the first time in twenty-three years and became acutely aware of something sort of like a tumor right in the center of his heart—the prognosis for a heart tumor is really shitty, by the way. But two decades of forgetting left it to calcify deep down in Eddie’s heart while he muddled through his boring, miserable life. Calcification can indicate the presence of invasive cancer cells, by the way. Either way, Eddie was certain he was dying.  
  

  2. Eddie was skewered nearly to death, survived by the skin of his teeth, and Richie said, “I love you.” Sometime during this sequence of events, Richie filled out mountains of paperwork on Eddie’s behalf and put his own address down when he realized he knew nothing about Eddie at all. And still, he said, “I love you.”  
  

  3. Several months passed with nothing but radio silence from Richie, until he called Eddie to tell him about the medical invoices.  
  

  4. Richie called each individual company and asked them for an itemized version of each bill to lower the costs.  
  

  5. Eddie loves Richie.  
  

  6. Eddie is in love with Richie [citation needed].



The first time Richie flies out to New York after they find themselves back on speaking terms, it’s for no other reason than he wants to see Eddie.

He does very little to conceal this fact. If this were a movie, it would probably be the big romantic overture of love that precedes the end of a cheesy romcom from the nineties, but Richie acts like it’s no big deal. Like he lives five minutes away and he’s just strolling down the block to see Eddie just because. He gets a hotel, which annoys Beverly greatly because she has a perfectly nice apartment with a perfectly nice couch with a perfectly nice pull-out bed in the living room, but Eddie thinks it’s probably better this way.

On his first day in the city, Eddie is rather annoyingly the office for an important meeting with a big client, and Richie waits for Eddie to get off work at a nearby café around the corner, wearing douchebag famous person sunglasses even though it’s overcast outside. He surprises Eddie with two tickets to see _Othello_ off-Broadway.

“Don’t you want to, I don’t know, sleep? Or something?” Eddie asks, while Richie downs a black coffee. He looks a little pale, a little sickly, much worse for wear. His schedule’s been pretty busy lately and flying across the country is always draining. But Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks, Richie really did grow up so handsome.

“I showered and took a disco nap at the hotel,” Richie says, grinning, always not-so-secretly happy when Eddie is fussing over him. “I wanna spend time with you, Eddie Spaghetti. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

When they were kids, Richie was always doling out dramatic overtures of love and adoration, usually ending in some joke about Eddie’s mom, and Eddie always got so infuriatingly flustered because he wanted Richie to be serious but was too scared to ask him if he was or if it was all just a cruel joke.

Eddie wishes he could go back in time and tell himself to relax and enjoy it while he had it, because he was going to lose it for a very, very long time.

It’s still a struggle, to tie up the threads of Eddie’s life then and now. Richie, who loved him, and Richie, who loves him. They’re the same, yet Eddie can’t stop separating them in his head. There’s no way that Richie now could love Eddie now the way that Richie then loved Eddie then. He feels like he’s just waiting for Richie to figure that out.

It’s a mild, almost dreary day. Eddie likes this kind of weather, but Richie complains that it’s too cold. Apparently, Los Angeles is nearly always perfect this time of year. Eddie wants to go to Los Angeles. He wants to hold Richie’s hand. He wants to do much more than hold Richie’s hand.

They take the subway to Beverly’s apartment and Richie tells Eddie about the production of _Othello_ he did in college. He played Iago, which Eddie thinks is very impressive, and Richie is very bashful that Eddie thinks so highly of his college theatre endeavors. The cast put together a small setlist of modern songs about betrayal, jealousy, and tragedy and would perform acoustic arrangements in between acts. Eddie thinks he would have gone to every show, front row center.

“I’ll bet you were a real heartbreaker in college,” Richie says.

“I was severely underweight and abusing Adderall,” Eddie says.

“Funny, that was _precisely_ my type,” Richie says sincerely.

“And now?” Eddie asks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Richie says. “I guess I kind of have a thing for uptight Wall Street-type guys. Angry gym rats.”

It isn’t like Eddie forgot he was gay over the course of the twenty-three years he spent removed from his younger self. He knew in college. He knew after he graduated. He knew when he met Myra. And he knew when he married Myra. How would things have turned out differently if he’d never had Richie and the others so viscously torn from his psyche?

They very well may have ended up in a similar fashion as today, he thinks. Sitting on the subway with Eddie’s leg pressed up again Richie’s. Two tickets for an off-Broadway show. Shakespeare, because Richie likes Shakespeare. He was always good at memorizing soliloquies for English class when they were in school. A constant reverie of nostalgia, the kind of pain that’s good for you. Maybe Richie would have loved Eddie through the worst of his life.

The mania, the meltdowns, the death of Sonia Kaspbrak and the devastating emotional fallout of every year that followed. The way Eddie has always felt slightly left of normal even with the double-edged privilege of forgetting his childhood trauma.

Eddie wonders how to show Richie the best of him. He wonders if Richie thinks that this _is_ the best of him. Eddie thinks he’s always had the best of Richie, ever since they were children, and Eddie only ever knew how to hide and withhold. Maybe there is no best of him.

At last, they reach Beverly’s apartment. She squeals with delight when she sees Richie, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him tightly. Eddie showers to rid himself of all traces of the work day and he can hear the faint sounds of Beverly and Richie laughing from the kitchen where they’re drinking cheap boxed wine.

Richie and Eddie take a cab to the theatre and Richie continues to excitedly regale his college theatre exploits. He did mostly plays, a musical here and there, and once directed a gender swapped production of the _Man of La Mancha_ where all of the pronouns and character names were kept the same.

What a joy it would have been to see this part of Richie’s life in action, Eddie thinks sadly. He gets the impression that leaving Derry was the best thing to ever happen to Richie. For Eddie, leaving Derry was barely a disruption to the usual somber, puritanical despair of his life. He went to college, he made a few friends but didn’t get particularly close with any of them, he dated a bit, he didn’t do much besides go to class and study. Tall boys with glasses in his lectures always caught his attention and this caused an agonizing ache in his heart every single time.

A pair of college-aged girls recognize Richie in the lobby of the theatre and ask for a quick selfie. Richie’s very kind and amiable about it. They ask if Eddie is Richie’s boyfriend and Richie laughs at the aggressive frankness. He says, “I don’t know,” which they think is a joke, because they laugh, too. They thank him for the selfie and head off to find their seats.

The show is good. Eddie’s never liked plays as much as he likes musicals. The big song-and-dance numbers keep his attention. Richie is so fully enraptured by what’s happening at the stage, he doesn’t look away once. Eddie mostly watches Richie watching the show, thinks about what painful fortune brought the two of them to this place together.

They talk about the show in the cab back to Midtown, get out a few blocks from Beverly’s and decide to stop at a bar. It’s noisy and crowded, deceptively filthy considering the cost of their drinks, and they drink until they are comfortably drunk. 

Richie takes Eddie’s hand and says, slowly, “I think we should run away together.”

“Where to?” Eddie asks.

“Anywhere.”

“I’ll go anywhere with you,” Eddie says.

“I think we should get married,” Richie says.

“My track record’s not great on that,” Eddie says.

“Maybe one day?” Richie asks.

“Maybe one day,” Eddie agrees. 

They walk back to Beverly’s apartment, close as can be, holding hands.

Richie flies out to New York City on business, but he makes time for Eddie. 

He’s been invited to host SNL, which is a huge deal even though he keeps pretending like it isn’t, and he calls Eddie to ask him out to lunch. They end up going to this old Italian place in Hell’s Kitchen where the lights in the dining room are so dim that they can barely see each other. It’s easier to talk that way.

Eddie tells Richie he’s getting ready to sign a lease for a new apartment in Washington Heights. Staying in Midtown with Beverly has been nice and all, but it’s completely out of his budget if he’s going to be living alone.

“It’s been nearly a year since we came back from Derry and I’m feeling much better now,” Eddie says. “I can’t live with Beverly forever. I can’t fall back into—you know, certain habits.”

It’s more for Beverly’s sake than for Eddie’s, he figures, but that’s embarrassing to admit. He doesn’t want Beverly to be the third in a line of women who he clings to and resists and resents in equal measure. He feels like that kid who accidentally calls his teacher mom in front of the entire class. If there is any clinical pathology to whatever the fuck was wrong with Norma and Norman Bates, Eddie is scared that he has that, too. He’ll have to talk to a therapist about this one day, but he’s tired of appointments right now. 

“I don’t think you should sign the lease,” Richie says. Eddie squints really hard and leans over the table, trying to get a good read on Richie’s face. He is terrifyingly inscrutable. Eddie leans back in his seat. Richie continues, “I don’t think you should sign the lease, because… I think you should move in with me.”

“You want me to move to California,” Eddie says. He’s thought about it, in some abstract kind of way. Maybe he’d like to go someplace warm. Maybe he’d like to go to the west coast. His psyche’s been working overtime trying to be as obvious as humanly possible, but Eddie is remarkably good at not taking bait. 

“We can stay here,” Richie says. “We can go to California. We can do whatever you want to do. You don’t have to decide right now.”

So, Eddie doesn’t decide right now. They finish lunch and go to a coffee shop on 44th street that Beverly’s always raving about. It’s below ground level and they’re the only ones there. Richie holds Eddie’s hand across the table. It feels so romantic and mundane, so special and completely commonplace. He says, “I really meant it, you know.”

Eddie says, “Yeah. I know.”

Richie says, “Did you?”

Eddie says, “Yeah. I’m pretty sure. Is that okay? That I’m still figuring things out, I mean.”

Richie smiles. He runs his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles, slowly, like he’s taking special care to memorize the curve of each bone. Eddie can tell he’s trying not to cry.

Eyes like the ocean, Eddie’s the driftwood, and together they are eternally ebbing and flowing. Or perhaps Richie is the king and Eddie is the bolder and they are fated to this laborious, uphill in-between of love for the rest of their days.

Richie says, “That’s more than I ever thought I’d get, Eddie.” 

“You shouldn’t anticipate settling for less than what you deserve,” Eddie says.

“That’s funny, coming from you,” Richie says, and there’s really no arguing with that.

When Eddie thinks about how willing Richie is to upend his entire life for the chance of them being together, it makes him feel angry, which is a confusing way for him to feel about being selflessly and sacrificially loved. It might have something to do with his inability to accept the fact that Richie wants whatever Eddie will give.

Would Richie still love Eddie if they could only see each other once, twice a year? Would Richie still love Eddie if they never touched each other? Would Richie still love Eddie if it turned out Eddie only wanted someone with a bank account to drain or something equally heinous?

The contradiction of Eddie’s own desire makes his head spin. He’s getting what he wants. He doesn’t know what he wants. He loves Richie. He’s scared of how much he loves Richie. He wants Richie to love him. He’s scared Richie will hate him. He’s scared he isn’t the person Richie thinks he is.

He’s scared of breaking Richie’s heart. He’s scared of having his own heart broken.

He’s scared of the enormity of his power over Richie. He hates it. He’s glad he has it. He could make Richie do whatever he wants. He doesn’t want Richie to make decisions only for Eddie’s sake. None of it makes sense.

And what would it take for Richie to look at Eddie and decide he just isn’t worth it anymore?

“It’s just that moving to California would be a big move for you,” Richie says.

“Yeah, and moving to New York would be a big move for _you_ ,” Eddie says.

The way that they’re lying shoulder to shoulder on Eddie’s bed, excruciatingly yet innocently close, reminds Eddie of being a kid. Richie used to come over with comic books that Sonia never wanted Eddie to read and they’d lie next to each other as close as two people can possibly be on Eddie’s twin sized bed. Eventually the comics would be forgotten and they would just talk and talk well into the evening, tracing pictures with their fingers against the backdrop of the ugly popcorn ceiling, until Sonia knocked on Eddie’s door and said Richie had better leave or she’d call the cops.

Eddie remembers wishing he could telepathically communicate with Richie that he wanted to hold his hand or maybe kiss him. Or, it was more like he wished for Richie to want to hold hands and kiss, which made him feel better about the idea of being a fifteen-year-old queer in rural Maine. Since it wouldn’t be his idea, after all, and the lack of culpability made him feel better.

Sonia did call the cops on Richie, once. He climbed out of Eddie’s bedroom window and said, _I’ll see you tomorrow, Eddie Spaghetti_ and then bolted off in the direction of his house _._ He wanted to see Eddie again, even after that.

They never did hold hands and they never did kiss. They were probably better off for it considering how stupid and volatile and hazardously obsessed with each other they were. It would have undoubtedly ended in disaster and possibly destroyed their friendship before clown amnesia did the honors.

So now they were forty-one, both miserable and insecure in new and exciting ways, and probably still just as stupid and volatile and hazardously obsessed with each other.

“I’ll go to California,” Eddie says.

“You’re sure?” Richie asks. “Because I’ll move here. Really. Or we can go somewhere else. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

Eddie’s throat tightens and his heart clenches up in his chest. It’ll probably never make sense to him—the fact that Richie loves him and the way Richie loves him and the things Richie would do for him. Logically, he is aware of the fact that Richie would happily do most things short of literally dying if Eddie asked, but he is fully unable to understand why.

He unlocks his phone and holds it up so Richie can see, then begins searching for flights from JFK to LAX. “Give me two weeks to take care of some things at work,” he says.

“Wh—wait—you—Eddie,” Richie stammers. “That soon?”

“Yes,” Eddie says. “Or I’ll never do it.”

“I mean, far be it from me to discourage you,” Richie says.

“Then don’t discourage me,” Eddie says.

“I just want you to be comfortable,” Richie says.

“It’s,” Eddie says, and he pauses. “It’s impossible for me to be uncomfortable with you.” He turns to face towards Richie and angles himself as best he can to give Richie a poorly aimed kiss on the corner of his mouth. He corrects himself, turning over onto his side more despite the aching in his chest and his arm, the reminder of what brought the two of them back together, and kisses Richie’s lips.

Richie stares at him for a moment, like he’s fully shellshocked, and then he asks him, “Are we really doing this, Eds?” It doesn’t sound like insecurity. Maybe disbelief. Maybe wonderment or something like that.

“Don’t call me that. And yes.”

Richie sits up, propping himself up on his elbow and looking at Eddie with all the tenderness of a child observing a newborn lamb. It’s confusing and it’s the safest Eddie has ever felt in his entire life.

“You’re really here, huh,” Richie says quietly. “I didn’t just make you up in my head.” He leans over towards Eddie and kisses his temple, right on his hairline. Reserved and innocent. This is exactly how it would have gone when they were fifteen and reading comics in Eddie’s bed. Maybe there’s no point in mourning the lost years.

Richie ends up cancelling his own flight back to LA and asking his manager to reschedule some things here and there for him, so he can fill up his extra time in New York City. He’ll stay until Eddie is finished up tying up loose ends and then they’ll leave together. Eddie thinks Richie is ridiculously goodhearted.

“New York has made you forget what it’s like to care about other people,” Richie teases him.

“I care about you,” Eddie says so earnestly that it leaves Richie winded for a moment.

Eddie doesn’t have much by way of material possessions. He hadn’t even when he was living with Myra—he always told himself it was a loose commitment to the minimalist concept—and now the testament of his existence as a real person is mostly in the form of stuffy work suits and unread self-help books he’s received in the mail from Ben. This is fine, of course, because it means he doesn’t have to sort through a mountain of frivolous bullshit before leaving for California.

“I want this,” Beverly says, holding up a watch of Eddie’s that he never wears. It had been a Christmas present from Myra about five years ago.

It was the year that Eddie had truly outdone himself with his gift for her—tickets to three Broadway shows, all consistently sold out and ridiculously expensive, procured at the cost of Eddie’s sanity after Myra had spent weeks loudly complaining that it’d been years since she and Eddie last saw a musical together. Myra was happy for a while, and then upset, because she thought that Eddie was disappointed in the watch compared to what he gotten for her and had, maybe, done this on purpose to make her feel bad. He told her that he didn’t think about gifts like that, they fought, they got over it, and _Once_ went on to win the Tony for Best Musical, so Myra was very proud to have seen it.

He doesn’t know why he brought it with him in the first place. Probably for the same reason he still keeps a small box of trinkets he gathered after his mother’s death. A pearl necklace, a shitty romance novel, cover bent and worn from frequent rereading through the years. Tiny things that don’t remind him of the bad times so much when removed from the larger context of his memories of life with his mother. Eddie had worn the watch each time he took Myra out to see the shows and enjoyed himself quite a bit.

But looking at it now, he hates it. “Take it,” he says. “You’re going to regift it to Ben, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” Beverly says. She puts the watch on, letting it hang loose on her thin wrist. “Or maybe I’ll keep it to remember you by. I’m gonna miss you, Eddie. I’m, like, deliriously fucking happy for you, but I’m going to miss you terribly. You know?”

“I know,” Eddie says, not looking away from the shirt he’s folding in his lap. He doesn’t want to look at Beverly. He’ll cry if he looks at Beverly. But Beverly isn’t like Sonia or Myra. She won’t take his tears and use them against him. She’ll just start crying, too, is the thing. And Eddie doesn’t think he can handle that right now.

“I was talking to Stan the other day, and you know what he told me? He told me everything’s going to be okay. Like, in general,” Beverly says. She holds her arm up to let the watch fall down until it can’t move over the width of it anymore. 

“Then it must be so,” Eddie says, because Stan has never told a lie in his life.

He finds that he wants to keep most of his suits, and most of his athletic wear, and most of his casual clothes. It’s too much to take all in one go, so Beverly says she’ll claim or donate what’s in the discard pile and ship what’s in the keep pile once he’s settled.

It’s one week until departure and it doesn’t feel real, even as Eddie compartmentalizes everything he owns. Richie’s been busy for the last week, appeasing his manager by going to meetings with writers and producers, schmoozing and networking, taking advantage of the momentum gained by his SNL appearance.

They’re flying out on the Fourth of July. Richie’s been sleeping in Beverly’s room with her when he doesn’t crash on the couch, just some weird unspoken ritual that quickly fell into place once he decided to stay in the city with Eddie. It’s good, Eddie figures, because they need their time together. They’ve always been like that, so raw and ugly with each other.

Eddie wonders what it must be like, to know someone wholly and completely. He assumes that it’s something everyone has but him, because he unconsciously won’t allow it to happen to him. It’s scary to think that he’ll never have that, even though he feels like he’s trying really fucking hard for it. Richie is waiting, willing, wanting Eddie to pure absolution and Eddie still feels like he’s trying to give Richie anything he can only to be stopped by a thick sheet of glass.

He’ll try harder, he decides. He’ll do it or die trying.

Flying makes Richie nervous. He doesn’t have to tell Eddie that for it be plainly obvious. The sweaty palms and stilted breath and rocking back and forth in his seat gets the message across. They’re waiting at the gate for their flight and Richie looks sickly pale and dangerously close to passing out, which is making Eddie extremely anxious by proxy.

Eddie offers him a Xanax, which he declines. His reasoning is that it will make him go to sleep and he wants to be awake in case Eddie needs anything from him during the flight. Eddie must have a stupid look on his face in response to that, because Richie starts laughing.

“What?” Eddie asks incredulously. “What could possibly be funny?”

“You look—fuck, you look so mad. You look like I told you to go fuck yourself,” Richie says.

“Forgive me for not understanding your logic here,” Eddie says. “You don’t have to take care of me. You can take care of yourself first, at the very least.”

“I don’t _have_ to do anything. I _want_ to. The altitude, you know, it’s probably going to make, um. Your chest and your arm hurt. So, I’d rather be awake for you,” Richie says. He can’t hold back his smile. Eddie remembers that smile. He knows that smile well, he loves that smile, it’s the one Richie has always only ever had for Eddie, specifically when Eddie has said something that Richie thinks is patently fucking ridiculous.

Richie tells Eddie he’ll be fine as long as Eddie holds his hand during takeoff, and Eddie pretends like it’s some great burden on him to do so. It isn’t a great burden. It’s nice to feel needed.

Twenty minutes into their flight and Eddie is nearly doubled over in pain as the increased altitude has every single cell in his body inflamed and aching, just as Richie had predicted. Richie is rubbing circles over Eddie’s back with one hand and gently massaging his scalp with the other, the lightest and gentlest touches to try and distract from the searing pain of the old wounds.

He does this ceaselessly until Eddie falls asleep. And when Eddie wakes up, he resumes. They don’t talk much, and Richie keeps himself awake while Eddie drifts in an out of sleep for the entire six-hour flight. Once they begin their descent into the city, Richie gently shakes Eddie’s shoulder to wake him up, so that Eddie won’t miss the way LA looks like a glowing circuit board against the black night.

There are fireworks exploding beneath them as the people of LA celebrate the Fourth of July on the ground below. It’s a vantage point Eddie had never thought about before, what fireworks must look like from above. Like looking down over a garden in flames from hundreds of feet in the air. They burst and shimmer in the night sky and fade out in trickling streams of light. Richie rests his chin on Eddie’s shoulder and watches with him. It’s the most beautiful thing Eddie has ever seen.

Living with Richie is nice—really, really fucking nice.

Richie moves the upstairs guest room into the downstairs master bedroom so that Eddie can have his space without having to traverse the stairs every night. For the first week, the two of them fall asleep together on the couch, never breaching the sanctity of either of their bedrooms.

There’s this feeling of rapid oscillation between roommates, best friends, _partners_ or _boyfriends_ or whatever is the appropriate term for two forty-one-year-old former closet cases who cohabitate and make out and then sleep in separate bedrooms.

It’s kind of like slowly inching into the shallow end of the swimming pool to adjust to the cold water. That’s always been the way Eddie’s preferred to do most things. He’s never been a dive right in kind of person. And Richie is patient and kind and so malleable to the addition of Eddie into every part of his life. Each step forward feels very carefully calculated and purposeful. Richie is sort of clingy, as tactile as he’s always been since they were children, but he’s also restrained and respectful of Eddie’s weird, seemingly arbitrary boundaries.

Eddie works mostly from the kitchen, taking calls and attending virtual meetings and answering emails. When he’s in more pain than usual, he works from bed. He doesn’t love it, but he’s been so preoccupied with adjusting to a new time zone, new schedule, entirely new lifestyle that he hasn’t stopped to think about a more permanent work setup that isn’t mostly centered on the kitchen table.

Then one day Richie comes home with a desk from Ikea and begins assembling it in the rarely used office nook in the living room.

“For me?” Eddie asks, muting his microphone and pulling one headphone out of his ear.

“For you,” Richie says, assembly instructions in one hand, screwdriver in the other.

“For me,” Eddie repeats quietly.

“It can’t be comfortable working in the kitchen all the time,” Richie says. “And I thought we could look at some chairs, something that’ll be nice and supportive for your—you know, everything. All the stuff that hurts. Something ergonomic.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says.

Richie gives him a lopsided grin and then returns to the desk assembly project. He’s doing a pretty good job.

The thing about Richie is that he’s good at a lot of things and Eddie finds this both unbelievably sexy and profoundly comforting. Eddie is good at a lot of things, too, despite the years of learned helplessness at the hands of his mother and then his wife, but Richie makes up for any deficits Eddie might have and Eddie was amazed when he first discovered that he is not even remotely resentful of this fact.

They’re both decent at cooking, but Richie can pull off more complex dishes. They both prefer to keep a clean home, but Eddie usually remembers the little things like clearing the lint trap in the dryer or cleaning the shower drain.

Richie’s schlubby bachelor persona is betrayed by the fact that he’s actually a little particular about cleanliness. It’s a skill that he learned, he explained to Eddie one day, from therapy that was centered on helping manage his ADHD. A messy house throws his entire brain out of whack because he’s trained his mind to function in this particular environment. Eddie’s desire for cleanliness stems, of course, from a lifelong fear of disease and death. So, between the two of them, all bases of housework are essentially covered.

Living in California has made Richie conscientious about water usage and brush fires. He explained to Eddie the concept of _defensible space_ around the house and the importance of maintaining the low, dry brush vegetation common in the area because of the inherent fire risk of living in Southern California. He took Eddie around the house and explained all of the precautions he’s taken to mitigate potential fire hazards.

It’s like the two of them were trapped in a stasis of their own childlike projections when the best they had were nightly phone conversations and Richie’s occasional ventures into New York City. Eddie did not conceptualize much about Richie’s life in California or his capabilities as a fully formed adult. Living under the same roof with someone will show you both the best and worst of them. As always, Eddie feels like Richie has always been giving him his absolute best. It’s profoundly different, though, now that Richie is consciously trying to form a space that Eddie wants to live in forever.

“Hey,” Eddie says.

Richie looks up. “Hmm?”

“I love you,” Eddie says.

“I love you, too, Eds,” Richie says, looking sort of like he’s surprised to hear it. He’s blushing a little. Cute. “I don’t think you get it. How much I love you.”

“I’m in love with you,” Eddie says. He hasn’t said that since that day in the hospital. He wanted to make sure he meant it before he said it again.

And he means it today. He really, truly means it.

Richie is silent for a moment, totally still like a movie frame frozen on a TV screen. He looks sad, almost. It’s a force of habit. Eddie knows that much about self-loathing and habitual despair. He says, “I’m in love with you, too, Eddie. I always have been.” 

Something is demanding Eddie’s attention in the meeting he’s been neglecting, so he puts his headphone back in and unmutes his microphone. Richie finishes building the desk in impressive time. Later that evening they lie together on the couch, watching TV and weighing out different options for ergonomic office chairs.

Beverly texts Eddie one morning with a picture of a stack of envelopes. He had forgotten to update his address (again!) for the various medical bills on which he still owes a significant amount upon moving across the country and the invoices have been stacking up in Beverly’s mailbox. Although Eddie has reminders in his phone to make payments, it’s stupid to have a bunch of invoices accumulating at Beverly’s apartment on the other side of the country.

The entire process of calling and talking to customer service representatives and explaining the situation is relatively painless, just tedious and annoying. That is, until he hits the ambulance bill. Thousands of dollars for a five-minute drive from Neibolt. The American healthcare system is a fucking travesty, Eddie thinks. And maybe, just _maybe_ Eddie resents his friends for not dragging his lifeless body to the hospital themselves. He’s the one who nearly died so he’s allowed to feel however he wants.

“Oh—Mr. Kaspbrak, it looks like your account has been open with us for almost a year now…” the representative says, once she’s finished updating his address.

“Well, yes,” Eddie says, starting to lose his patience, “almost dying is expensive.”

“Of course, I understand completely. It’s just—well, typically, we don’t like to have accounts open for that long. I have it in our records that someone spoke to you about this a few months ago. But I understand things must have been extremely hectic for you.”

Eddie can’t remember talking to anyone about this, but then again, he can’t remember a lot about that period of his life. He waits for her to continue.

“The reason why your bill is so high, Mr. Kaspbrak, is because your insurance only paid eighteen dollars on it. They don’t cover the ambulance service that you used, but it was the only ambulance service in the area where you required transportation. So, I need you to do something for me, okay?”

“Mmmhmm, sure,” Eddie says, pulling his phone away from his ear and putting it on speakerphone. He reaches over towards the coffee table where a pen is sitting on a piece of scrap paper, covered in sparse, illegible notes in Richie’s handwriting.

“What I need you to do is to call your insurance company and explain your situation to them. You had no choice but to use the only ambulance service available in—let’s see, Derry? So, they need to pay more than just eighteen dollars on your bill, since it was an unavoidable ambulance ride. Give them the account number on your statement and let them know you’re making an appeal. Got it? I can even give you the number for the department you’ll need to contact—we deal with this same situation constantly from this particular provider.”

Eddie scribbles down the words, _CALL INSURANCE PROVIDER – APPEAL AMBULANCE BILL – ONLY AMBULANCE IN THE AREA, HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO TAKE AN AMBULANCE BECAUSE I WAS DYING – THEY ONLY PAID $18 FUCKING DOLLARS?????_ _1-800-252-0816 CALL AND TELL THEM THEY NEED TO PAY MORE_

He’s too exhausted to sit on the phone again for another twenty minutes going back and forth about the worst day of his life, so he decides that he’ll call his insurance provider tomorrow.

Eddie has always existed in a perilous state of manic exhaustion since basically the day he was born, but today he just feels truly burnt out on a cellular level. He’s tired from working unnecessary supplemental hours no one’s actually asking for and from weekly text messages Myra sends him from burner numbers and from forty-one years of just being a miserable person. 

There was a nurse in the hospital who lightly scolded Eddie for being too hard on himself. Establishing self-imposed rules regarding his sleep schedule and his diet, the two things he felt like he had even an ounce of control over when he was bedbound, nearly completely immobile. She told him that it’s good to take a nap sometimes.

“It sounds like a no-brainer, right?” she said. “But you’d be surprised at how many people don’t allow themselves a moment to relax.”

It’s Eddie’s biweekly Friday off and he has nothing to do. Calling about his medical bills was his only real task for the day. The house is quiet.

Richie isn’t home, he’s meeting with some Hollywood bigwig about a new HBO project or something like that—Eddie doesn’t really know. And it isn’t that Eddie doesn’t care, and it isn’t that Eddie doesn’t ask about these things, it’s that Richie can be extremely, infuriatingly evasive when it comes to talking about his career.

Richie will sit and listen intently to Eddie rant ad nauseum about a moronic email he’s received from a client, but when Eddie asks Richie for one or maybe even two details on something he’s working on, he gets a little cagey and weird. “It’s stupid, really,” he always says. “You’d think it’s dumb.” It bothers Eddie that Richie thinks so poorly of himself and his work.

Due to the nature of Richie’s work, Eddie could easily just Google whatever he wants about Richie at any moment and find out more than any person needs to know about him, but he doesn’t want to do that. He wants Richie to talk to him, share things with him, vent and complain and confide in him.

When Eddie realized that he loves Richie, when Eddie realized that he wants to be with Richie— _with_ , meaningfully, or simply with him in the same room—he knew that he was going to have to learn a wealth of new things about Richie. Now he’s putting together a jigsaw puzzle, he has the pieces of the boy he once knew but those pieces are now flipped over, concealing the picture, leaving Eddie reliant only on curves and cuts and silhouettes. 

But it’s fine. Maybe fine isn’t the right word, but it isn’t surprising. Looking back on the Richie that Eddie knew years ago, it’s easy to see that he was suffering from a case of abysmally low self-esteem from the time he hit puberty and onward. And although Eddie was hopelessly in love with Richie at that time—perhaps _because_ Eddie was hopelessly in love with Richie at the time, he didn’t understand the way Richie’s agonizing insecurity reared its ugly head. They’re adults now and Eddie has the emotional intelligence to see all of that. Recognizing it is one thing. Getting through to Richie is another.

It would be nice to know what Richie’s up to, all things considered.

Eddie’s tired. He doesn’t want to think about anything anymore. The wind chimes are twinkling gently outside on the patio. It’s the first time since he moved to California that he’s really felt like he’s home. Maybe the first time in his entire life. Home is where you can rest on the couch without feeling guilty.

It’s nice. He lies down and tells himself he’s going to close his eyes for just a moment. He thinks about Richie, he misses Richie, and then he promptly falls asleep.

“Okay—yeah, but—listen, you’re trying to confuse me and I’m not falling for it. I called to contest my bill months ago because it was thousands of dollars and you guys only paid like, eighteen. Right—again, I was stabbed through the chest with a piece of rebar and had no choice but to take an ambulance to the hospital,” is what causes Eddie to stir from his nap. He blinks. He registers that his own medical history is being recounted, but he is not the one doing the recounting.

Richie is sitting next to him on the couch, one hand holding his phone to his ear, his other hand wrapped around Eddie’s ankle, thumb pressed against the bone. Just a simple touch, probably for no other reason than to know Eddie’s there. Richie is prone to those. He notices that Eddie is awake and gives him a quick smile before he resumes speaking, falling right back into business mode.

“The name on the account is Kaspbrak. K-a-s-p-b-r-a-k. Yeah. Derry Memorial Hospital. I’m—okay. Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying. So the charge will be adjusted on the next invoice? Okay. Yes. Thanks. I would really appreciate it if you could send something to the email you have on file so that both of us have it in writing that I’m going to be reimbursed for the payments I’ve already made. Cool.” Richie ends the call. He turns towards Eddie, leans over and gives him a quick kiss on the forehead. “Sorry to wake you,” he says, and then he sits back upright. 

“It’s fine, I didn’t mean to fall asleep anyway. You called…?” Eddie starts.

“Oh! Oh, uh, yeah. Sorry to nose around your business, I just saw your note and thought I would take care of it for you since I already talked to them before? You know,” Richie says, looking very ashamed. “I hope it’s okay. I don’t want to, like, overstep or do… Sonia stuff.”

“No, that’s fine,” Eddie says, meaning it from the bottom of his heart.

It’s a funny sort of feeling. Eddie has lived most of his life detesting the very notion of being perceived. His mother, his college girlfriends, Myra—he always worked so tirelessly to keep every aspect of himself well concealed as to avoid unwanted attention. Myra had the intuitive ability of digging her fingers into every private thought Eddie ever attempted to have for himself. Every walk to the bodega just to get away for a moment, every mundane doctor’s appointment he didn’t want to tell her about, every evening at the gym somehow spearheaded weeklong conversations about how Eddie wasn’t well, he was behaving strangely, it was scaring her, and he was dying.

But with Richie…

Eddie says, “I kind of like it. When you go out of your way for me. I like knowing that you pay attention.”

Richie’s face cracks open in a huge, goofy grin. And despite his smile, he honest to God looks like he’s going to cry. “I like going out of my way for you,” he says.

“We’re a perfect match,” Eddie says.

“You think so?” Richie asks, reaching over to brush Eddie’s hair out of his eyes.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I do.”

“What a coincidence,” Richie says. “I do, too.” He runs two fingers lightly down Eddie’s face, catching over his bottom lip, and Eddie wants to take those two fingers into his mouth and suck on them down to the bones. He wants to figuratively and literally consume Richie in any way he can.

Just because he can. Just because Richie would let him. There’s something so absurdly thrilling about this idea that no one’s keeping score between them, not the way Myra did—tallying up everything she did for Eddie and all of the things he failed to do for her, reducing any displays of marital warmth to cold obligation that Eddie could check off of his list of things to do at the end of the day along with sending important work emails and picking up carrots at the grocery store for dinner.

Richie always wakes up before Eddie, so Eddie sets out vitamins for him on the kitchen counter every night before bed so he’ll remember to take them in the morning. Richie picked up Eddie’s prescriptions for him at his new pharmacy even though Eddie didn’t ask him to. Just so Eddie didn’t have to drive to the pharmacy, because driving is painful for Eddie now. Not impossible, just painful, and Richie doesn’t want Eddie to feel pain.

The blinds around the living room are all opened to varying degrees and light from the golden hour outside illuminates Richie’s features to perfection. His smile, the curve of his nose, the shape of his eyes. Richie’s fingers hover over Eddie’s lips before he cups his hand over Eddie’s cheek, rubbing his thumb over the scar. Eddie doesn’t hate the scar as much as he thought he would. Richie looks at it so reverently.

Neither of them speaks for a moment. Richie is probably mulling over his own existential revelation inside his head. Eddie wants to ask him, _what do you want from me? Now that I’m here, now that you have me, what are we going to do? Is this forever? Can you promise me that this is forever?_

“I still can’t believe you’re here,” Richie says, finally.

Eddie can’t believe it either, and he wants to, and knows that he needs irrefutable proof that it’s okay to believe that this belongs to him. This life belongs to him. Richie belongs to him. He moves to sit up and he takes Richie’s face in his hands, and he leans in, and he kisses him. Eddie kisses Richie with forty-one years of desperation and all of the love in his wounded heart. With everything that was nearly pushed from his chest in the sewers of Derry. What was tucked back inside, sewn up, and left there waiting for Eddie to relinquish on his own terms. So much of him already belonged to Richie, even when he never knew a person like Richie existed at all.

Richie gasps back against the kiss, he’s frozen for a moment, and then he kisses Eddie back with equal urgency—it’s strange and endearing that every time they kiss, Richie’s responds as if it’s the first time. He holds his hands at the small of Eddie’s back and parts Eddie’s lips with his tongue. And Eddie thinks it’s sickening, the way nothing will ever truly be enough.

The way he wants to tear Richie open and live inside him. Hook his fingers down Richie’s throat and scoop up his innards to make room for himself. Love makes Eddie into something feral and disgusting. It’s taken him this long to realize, because he’s never loved anyone the way he loves Richie.

“I love you,” Eddie says, his voice muffled up against Richie’s mouth. It’s a useless, simplistic reduction of what Eddie wants to tell him. _I love you so much that it hurts, and I want you to love me so much that I die from it_. 

“I don’t think you understand how much I love you,” Richie says, pulling back just slightly to look at Eddie. He’s clutching at the back of Eddie’s shirt, trying very hard to keep his hands from moving elsewhere. Eddie is familiar with the thrum of energy that vibrates from Richie’s body when he’s trying to stay still. His fingers move slightly under the hem of Eddie’s shirt, brushing lightly against his skin.

“You always say that,” Eddie says, kissing Richie over his jaw, down his neck, and towards his collarbone. He’s perilously balanced, one knee in between Richie’s legs and the other sliding off the couch. Richie holds him steady. Eddie could easily move forward like a tiger on the hunt, straddle him, envelope him, he can feel the way Richie’s body is ready to give against his—but he wants to be pulled in. Whether it’s insecurity, or his pride, or his ego, Eddie needs to feel Richie pulling him inward. Eddie wants, needs to know that Richie is dying from this same devastating, ravenous greed for him.

“Because it’s true,” Richie says, sounding so resigned to this loneliness he can’t seem to escape. A fatalistic sort of sadness. Eddie thinks, dizzy with affection, that he wants to give Richie everything. He doesn’t even really know what that means yet, hasn’t been able to figure it out since he was barely half-alive in the hospital and Richie said _I love you_ and Eddie thought _I want to see you every day of my life_.

Eddie wants to give Richie everything, all of it, eternally. And then Richie finally moves his hands, effortlessly pulling Eddie up into his lap, kissing him messy and hungry.

Eddie can feel that Richie’s already hard, so he grinds his hips down against him, basking in the gasping, low moan Richie lets out in response, how Richie rests his head on Eddie’s shoulder and holds him tight like he’s so scared to lose this.

“What do you want me to do?” Eddie asks, moving his hand up to Richie’s hair, running his fingers through the mess of curls.

“Anything,” Richie says up against Eddie’s neck. “Anything you want.”

So Eddie begins moving downward, sliding down off of the couch and fitting himself between Richie’s legs. Richie’s staring at him, eyes wide and pupils blown, in complete and utter shock. Eddie unbuckles Richie’s belt, unbuttons his pants and yanks them down just enough for what he wants to do.

“Eds—” Richie starts, then he swallows hard, then his breathing hitches. He’s sitting frozen again. He’s afraid of breaking the illusion. Eddie knows, because Eddie’s afraid, too. That one wrong move will end this. He’ll open his eyes and be underneath Derry, bleeding, dying. 

Then Richie says, “Eddie, I love you. I love you more than—” And he stops. More than…? Eddie doesn’t need to know, he figures. Richie doesn’t need to try and explain. If it’s infinite, if it’s eternal, there’s no _more than_ anything. It’s a fundamental reality of the universe and it’s incomparable to anything else. As true as the earth’s rotation and star patterns and planets retrograding. The human mind can’t comprehend a certain level of vastness and forever.

Maybe Richie’s right—Eddie doesn’t understand how much Richie loves him. But Eddie’s going to try, anyway.

He presses his palm over the hard outline of Richie’s cock and toys with the waistband of Richie’s boxers with his other hand. Richie moans and his hips jerk forward. He’s gripping desperately at the couch cushion. Eddie looks up at him and feels like some kind of fucking maniac—he says, “I’ve never done this before,” in a very intentional way. The whining sound in the back of Richie’s throat tells Eddie that the knowledge of this being Eddie’s first time touching someone else’s dick is doing something for him.

Eddie wants to know if it would be different, if he had done this before. If that Madonna-whore bullshit would apply. If Richie would be disillusioned. If Richie would be as jealous as Eddie is over knowing that anyone has had Richie like this before.

“I always wanted you to be the first,” Richie says breathlessly, while Eddie applies just a little more pressure against him. “The only—I wanted you to be everything, Eddie. I loved you, then.”

“I know,” Eddie says, pulling down Richie’s boxers. “Me, too.”

Even though he’s never done this before, Eddie isn’t at a complete loss here. He can intuit that Richie is going to lose his mind no matter what. Richie is embarrassed and says he probably isn’t going to last very long. Eddie says that’s okay, that’s fine, I love you, and takes the head of Richie’s cock into his mouth.

Richie is so big that it’s almost cumbersome and he tells Eddie he doesn’t have to take all of him if it’s too much, tells him this as he’s panting and moaning, needy and already unraveling, barely able to string together an intelligible sentence.

Eddie slowly moves his mouth further down the length of Richie’s cock, careful not to take too much at once. He wants to tell Richie to shut up and enjoy getting his dick sucked—but it’s just so like Richie, always worried for Eddie’s sake. Always prioritizing Eddie’s comfort. One more involuntarily jerk of Richie’s hips makes Eddie gag a little, but he persists. Richie reaches down and messes up his hair, tells him it feels good, tells him he loves him, tells him he’s never loved anyone else.

The heat of it all, the weight on his tongue, the way his jaw is starting to burn and ache from the strain of stretching his mouth around Richie makes Eddie feel like he could die happy after having experienced this even just this once. He has one arm hooked over Richie’s thigh for balance and he’s so hard, so desperate to touch himself through his pants, but he doesn’t want to come without Richie’s hands on him. In an effort to resist the temptation, he reaches up with his other hand, under Richie’s shirt, landing right over his heart, beating hard like a frightened rabbit’s. He could dig into the flesh on Richie’s chest and tear his heart right out. Richie would let him.

And Eddie feels _so_ frenzied and overwhelmed and disgusting and alive and in love. He swallows down more of Richie than he can really handle, his eyes begin to water, he feels like he might start choking. He moves his head up, down, up, down with dedicated concentration wholly lacking in anything resembling finesse—but Richie doesn’t care. He’s gripping his fingers tight in Eddie’s hair, chest heaving, saying _Eddie Eddie Eddie._ He manages enough composure to say, “Eddie—Eds, dude, if you don’t want me to come in your mouth—”

Eddie pulls off of Richie with a gasping breath and says, “Why the fuck would you call me dude when your dick is in my mouth?” and Richie laughs at that, sounding almost hysterical.

He pulls his hand down from Richie’s chest and begins jerking him off, stroking his cock with a calculated, measured pace, pressing his thumb over the slit, spreading pre-come over the spit-slicked length. Richie comes with a choked sob, some of it makes it into Eddie’s hand, some on his shirt, some on his face, and Eddie’s okay with all of it.

They’re both silent for a brief moment besides their labored breathing, and then Richie leans forward and pulls Eddie up into his lap. He yanks Eddie’s sweatpants down and then grabs Eddie’s hand, covered in his own come, and guides both of their hands together to Eddie’s cock. It’s unclear who is calling the shots as they begin moving their hands together, stroking Eddie off almost frantically, almost desperately, while Richie uses his other hand to ruck Eddie’s shirt up and run his fingers over the scar tissue on Eddie’s chest.

“Jesus Christ, Eddie, I love you fucking so much,” he whispers, pressing his forehead against Eddie’s. “I can’t believe I get to have you like this. I can’t believe this is mine.”

Eddie can’t bring himself to say much. He feels completely out of his own head. Not in the dissociative way he had to assume to get through perfunctory marriage bed activity with Myra, but in the way that he has such a profound trust that Richie is gladly existing in this moment solely for Eddie’s benefit, in pursuit of Eddie’s pleasure. It’s the feeling of really being able to let go for the first time in his life.

Richie’s hand over Eddie’s is so big, their hands together are sticky and moving arrhythmically and messy over Eddie’s cock. Eddie takes his free hand and holds it up to Richie’s face, slides two fingers into his mouth, and Richie groans around them. Eddie rocks his hips forward and his orgasm hits him like a lightning bolt to a well, like a metal chain to an electric fence, like the painful then peaceful reverie he felt in the ambulance when he was certain he was dying and strangely okay with that prospect. He slumps over in Richie’s arms, panting against his neck, and he doesn’t move for quite some time. Richie holds him there, sturdy and patient.

“Hey,” Richie says, finally, kissing Eddie’s temple. “Should have told me sooner all it took to get into your pants was calling and getting your ambulance bill reduced.”

“You stupid idiot,” Eddie says, and then they’re laughing together. They fall back on the couch and Eddie complains about the mess. Richie kisses him, deeply and slowly, and everything makes a little more sense than it did before.

After they’ve showered and ordered dinner, they sit together and watch old episodes of _Jeopardy_. Richie tells Eddie that he’s been meeting with some HBO execs about a scripted drama slash dark comedy that’s a little out of his wheelhouse, but is more aligned with the kind of work he wants to do with his new career trajectory. Steve landed him a talk show appearance alongside a popular K-pop group, so a lot of people will be tuning in. He talks so excitedly about all of these different projects, ongoing and current and potential, that he’d never mentioned to Eddie prior to today.

“I was thinking,” Eddie says, pressing his hand up again Richie’s, noting the difference in size. Loving it very much. “You were right. We should get married.”

Richie’s eyes widen and he grips Eddie’s hand tight. “For real? Right now?”

“After we work some stuff out? You know, therapy and all that?” Eddie suggests.

“Yeah, sure,” Richie says, with all of the seriousness of swearing before a judge. “Really, Eddie, whenever you’re ready.”

On the TV, Alex Trebek says the character Desdemona is smothered in her bed by the titular character in this Shakespeare play and Richie is so giddy and flustered, he doesn’t even get the answer in time. 

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter!](https://twitter.com/hereditary_2018)


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